Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Those Evil, Evil Change-Agents

In my church culture, it's not rare to hear someone railing against "change-agents", those "people who sneak into a church and then effect change from the inside, 'corrupting' the pure church into some new denomination-like shadow of the former true church".

When such change-agents do indeed corrupt the church into something other than the church which Christ established, I'm fully on-board with those who rail against such change-agents.

Yet, we need to be careful about slinging around labels like "change-agent", simply because if change is needed, we need change-agents to bring about that change.

The problem in my church culture is that most of us are 100% convinced that we have completely restored the first-century church of Christ, and therefore any change is a corruption.

But what if we haven't completely restored the first-century church? What if we've missed something in our theology? In such a case, we need, and should welcome, change-agents to step up and bring us in-line with Biblical teaching.

The danger is that we tend to immediately dismiss change-agents as corrupters without being like the Bereans who searched the scriptures daily to see if these things be so (Acts 17:11).

Next time a "change-agent" shows up in your church, will you be mature enough to hear what he has to say, and to weigh it against scripture, or will you be satisfied to keep believing that you already have all the answers? Yahshua considers guilty those people who claim to have the answers when they really don't (John 9:41, in context). Are you claiming to "see"?